Needle in the haystack: What to look for when your key applications are down

We’ve all been there… something goes wrong, and we’re eager to find and point a finger at the cause. After all, until you find the root of the issue, there’s no way to properly address it.

The same happens when a critical application experiences downtime within a business setting. In these instances, the impact can be huge. The company’s internal employees can’t continue normal processes or production, and the organization’s customers may be unable to connect with and use client-facing platforms. So when your infrastructure slows down or comes to a halt, how do you respond?

Why does failure happen?

One of the biggest hurdles with an IT-related failure is in determining the root cause of the issue. After all, as experts have pointed out, there can be a nearly endless list of reasons why a critical asset could fail including:

Complex, heterogeneous environments, which contain a mix of new, legacy and shadow IT applications, and are extremely challenging to navigate.

Inadequate monitoring and reporting can cause a small, unaddressed issue to grow into an enterprise-wide catastrophe.

Resource bottlenecks and capacity issues could mean applications don’t have the necessary infrastructure support to perform as they should.

Network or cloud problems performance hangups can occur as a result of failures within the respective infrastructures.

And this only scratches the surface… different applications with certain integrations could experience issues due to a whole host of other problems. For this reason, it is absolutely critical that IT administrators and stakeholders have a way to monitor their infrastructure systems, and glean in-depth visibility and insights into the health and performance of each supporting asset.

When something goes wrong with one of your key apps, how do you find and address the correct cause?

What does failure cost?

Downtime and failures are incredibly costly for businesses. CloudTweaks reported that general downtime currently costs the average business a staggering $686,000 for each hour that an application is unavailable.

“With 18 percent of firms saying that IT outages had a ‘very damaging’ impact on their reputation, it’s clear that the knock-on effect of downtime can carry serious implications for enterprises both imminently and into the foreseeable future,” CloudTweaks stated.

Finding the needle in the haystack with IT performance monitoring

So how can organizations prevent the impact and high costs of downtime, while ensuring that they identify and quickly address the correct cause of potential failures? IT teams require a robust infrastructure performance monitoring solution that provides in-depth visibility into the capacity, performance and overall condition of key elements including servers, storage, systems, databases, SAN and cloud environments.

“Downtime currently costs a staggering $686,000 for each hour that an application is unavailable.”

With this type of solution on their side, IT admins and executives can be sure that they are able to pinpoint that needle in the haystack – and that they’re able to address the issue before it creates a snowball effect throughout the organization.

Advanced technology, like Galileo’s infrastructure performance monitoring, works by monitoring key infrastructure assets, and alerting users to any associated issues based on unique and customizable thresholds. For example, should a capacity issue begin to emerge within a certain server, teams will be notified via intuitive severity indicators and can correct the problem before it corrupts performance.

Without such a powerful solution, IT teams are left to manually identify any capacity or performance issues, which not only typically occurs too late, but can cause the cost of overall downtime to skyrocket.

Infrastructure performance monitoring, like that supported by the user-friendly, visual dashboards within Galileo Performance Explorer, ensures that IT teams can proactively address any potential issues and greatly reduce the chances for expensive and impactful downtime.

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[…] make the necessary adjustments to adapt to incremental changes. Instead of scrambling to find the needle in the haystack following costly infrastructure issues, teams should strive to be proactive, anticipating issues […]